I nodded my head, scraping a thumb under my eyes to wipe away my tears. Get it together, Cartwright.
“Agreed. While I do that, maybe you two can figure out what Bel meant by us. Come up with some theories, I don’t know. Something. Anything. Please.”
“Us…” Win repeated.
Grabbing the door handle, I inhaled deeply but my hands shook. “Yes. He said help us. I don’t know what that means, but he said it twice. It means something.”
Win’s aura wrapped around me, rocking me as Arkady reassured me with his typical tough guy approach. “We shall seek and destroy, kitten. I will break the fingers of every spirit I come into contact with until they tell me about this bad man who means you harm. We will find him. Now you go. Talk to Petula and ask about Chef Cheater’s letter, dah?”
Shaking off my anxieties, I only nodded, pushing the door open and making a break for her shop through the pouring rain. Bursting through the door, I forced myself to slow down so I wouldn’t make Petula any more anxious than she already was.
I loved Petula’s shop, filled with samples for wedding cakes and gorgeous flower arrangements in pastel colors. She’d decorated the shop in silver and a pale green for Christmas, with pearlescent white accents, every spray of greenery on her counters and above the doorways dipped in a sugar-frosted white.
It almost always soothed me to wander through the vignettes Petula created with such ease. My eyes never missed the chance to roam over the rustic armoires and buffet tables she’d nestled into corners to display the various stemware and plates she offered to her clients.
But today all I could think about was her unwitting connection to Bel and that dirty cheat Chef Le June. It didn’t help that the store was in total chaos, Petula’s staff moving about frantically as some held cell phones to their ears and paced while others organized flyers with Edmund’s picture on them.
They’d set up a search-party table for Edmund, and I was pleased to see the majority of her staff bustling about, each with a task. Under any other circumstance, I’d be out there beating the forest floor with my stick, helping the search party look for him as if he were my own. Edmund was a good kid, polite and sweet, and he deserved to have these people devote so much effort to recovering him.
But I was the only search party Bel had, and I couldn’t tell anyone else about his disappearance. So while I hated insinuating myself into the middle of their efforts, I had little choice.
I spotted Petula by the kitchen door, still harried, her agitation clear as she glanced at a clipboard, holding it with trembling fingers. Approaching with care, I placed a light hand on her shoulder and offered a smile.
“Can I just get a minute of your time, Petula?”
“Oh, Stevie,” she moaned, her lower lip quivering. “Everything’s such a mess, and I think it’s all because of Pascal. This is all my fault.”
Tucking my purse under my arm, I gave her another gentle smile. “That’s not true, Petula. All you did was hire one of France’s best pastry chefs, whom you just happened to fall in love with. The heart gets in the way of the brain sometimes, that’s all. Don’t beat yourself up about this.”
“I just don’t understand how he had all this time to run around behind my back! I knew I should have hired Henri instead. What was I thinking?”
“Henri? Who’s Henri?” No one had ever mentioned an Henri.
“Henri Prideux. He was the first pastry chef I interviewed, a perfectly lovely, fat, jolly man who was just as qualified as Pascal. But did I pay any attention to that? No. I was too busy swooning over Pascal’s handsome good looks and charm. I behaved like an absolute schoolgirl and now look what’s happened!”
“I had no idea you’d even entertained hiring anyone else, Petula.” My astonishment was hard to hide.
Her red-rimmed eyes narrowed and her chapped lips flexed into a thin line as she let out a disgusted huff. “That’s because I’m an old fool. Pascal is fifteen years my junior, for pity’s sake. I don’t know what I was thinking, but now that my ridiculous romance haze is clearing, I see very clearly the mistake I made.”
I wanted to tread delicately here because Petula was so hurt, but something had been nagging me since the two of them had gotten together.
“About Pascal. Absolutely no offense, but I always wondered why someone so acclaimed would come to small-town Eb Falls all the way from France. He was always telling us about how he made pastries for all manner of royalty and suddenly he’s willing to create his lighter-than-air confections for the bingo club? It made me question what brought him here.”
Petula blew a breath of air, her cheeks puffing outward, the guilt in her eyes crystal clear. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I tell you because it’s going to get out anyway, and it’s not like the police told me to keep quiet about it…”
My ears burned, but I held my tongue and waited for Petula to speak.
“He was a filthy fake! That’s what brought him here to Washington. He’s no more French than I am a runway model,” Petula spat.
I cocked my head to the left in question. “Say again?”
“Pascal’s real name is Jerry Manzo, and he’s not from France, he’s from New Jersey. Piscataway, if I recall.”
Holy cats! “So the French accent, the oui oui and croissants…?”
Her nose scrunched up in disgust. “All a total fake! I didn’t find out until this morning, when the police told me his true identity. I’m sick about it, Stevie. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. The only thing he was telling the truth about was he does have training as a pastry chef. He didn’t go to school in France, but his credentials are real, for all the good that does anyone. An egotistical, lying pastry chef with a checkered past.”
I blinked, almost unable to process this information. “And his wife?”
Petula’s sigh was ragged. “He doesn’t have a wife. He has a loan shark. That’s who he was talking to on the phone that night I heard him. He came here to Eb Falls from New Jersey because he owed some loan shark money. So he stole some poor dead chef’s name and became Pascal Le June. His fingerprints were in the police database. That’s how they ID’d him. Because he isn’t just a shyster, he’s got a long history of wooing women with his Frenchness and stealing their money.”
So we had another suspect, maybe? A loan shark. I pulled Petula into a hug and clenched my eyes shut. My heart ached for hers. I hated that she’d been duped.
“Oh, Petula. I’m so sorry.”
She shuddered against me, but she sounded stronger than she had in Strange Brew, and that gave me hope. It was as if confronting Cassie had helped her push toward the road to empowerment.
“Bah!” she hissed. “Better I find out now than after he took off with my money, right? I knew something wasn’t quite right about him wanting me to invest money so he could open his own shop in Seattle, but I was just so blinded by his good looks. I’m such an old fool.”
Setting her from me, I brushed her mussed hair from her cheek. “No! That’s not true. You have a good heart and you’re a smart woman. Now, no more beating yourself up about it, understood? I won’t have it.”
Her return smile was grim, but Petula was a tough broad. She’d pull up her bootstraps and recover from Chef Bed Hopper in no time flat. I had faith. She’d built her business from the ground up all on her own; she’d rebuild her love life just the same way.
“I hate to brush you off, but I really have to go, Stevie. I’ve got to help search for Edmund. Is there anything else I can help with?”
“Just a couple more quick things. I know you said last night you didn’t have any answers, but I thought maybe after having some time to talk with your staff and think things over, you might have remembered something. Do you have any idea why Jerry was at my house instead of Edmund last night?”
“If I had the answer to that, we might have another piece of this puzzle. None of us know why that lying thief went to your house. None of it makes any sense.”
Dang. I ju
st couldn’t get a break. “Okay, and any idea why he’d leave such a nice note to me along with that special pastry? In all truth, he wasn’t exactly the type of man to be so considerate.”
Petula’s eyes went wide in surprise as she placed her hands on her rounded hips. “Special pastry? What kind of pastry? What did it look like?”
“Uh-huh. Believe me, I was just as surprised. The note said it was an opera cake. I’ve never heard of it before, and of course, it struck me as odd he’d make something so delicate and what appeared to be incredibly time-consuming. Especially for me. It came off as so random.”
Pressing her fingers to her lips, her brow furrowed as her gaze grew sheepish. “Opera cake, you say? I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but I don’t recall him making anything other than what you ordered, or writing you a note. What do you wanna bet he found out you were rich and decided to add you to the notches on his bedpost. He didn’t just hook me with his good looks and French accent; he really was the quintessential pastry chef. Not that someone as smart and pretty as you would ever fall for such a bunch of hooey anyway. You just leave the stupid to us old broads.”
“Petula,” I warned, my smile admonishing. “No more of that. You’re beautiful and smart and the best party planner/caterer in the business. Also, I adore you, and no one speaks ill of someone I adore. Not even the someone I adore.”
No sooner had I spoken those words than the door of the shop blew open and Detective Kaepernick breezed inside, her ear to her cell.
“Yep. Got it, Boss. Asphyxiation and some unidentifiable plant substance we can only find one obscure mention of on the Internet. I’ll get right on it and start asking questions,” she barked—then paused and nodded, then frowned. “It’s what you say?”
I knew I was eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help leaning into the space between Melba and myself. If her conversation had to do with Chef Liar Liar Pants On Fire’s cause of death, I wanted to hear.
But it was her next question that left my hands like icicles and struck terror in my heart.
“Witches? What does a rare plant from New Zealand have to do with witches, Boss?”
Chapter 11
“Oh, dear heaven,” Win muttered.
I nodded in silent agreement. You said it, buddy.
Melba nodded her head and frowned again, driving a hand into the pockets of her jeans. “Right-right. Gotcha. Ah. I see. So there was a trace of this plant in the pastry and in the crumbs on the chef’s mouth.” Then she nodded animatedly. “Ahhh. Okay, so that wasn’t what killed the dude, huh? Interesting-interesting. So you want me to ask what’s in this opera cake?” She nodded again, her colorful hair with a fresh headband holding the bun atop her head in place bouncing about as she did. “Right. So keep the crazy witch stuff on the down low so people don’t think we’ve plain lost our gourds. Can do.”
Arkady whistled long and low. “This is no good, petunia. No darn good.”
No. No, it wasn’t good, and I had to figure out what it all meant.
It was then Melba realized we were all staring at her, her eyes rising to meet mine. Biting her lips, she winced before she returned to her call. “I’ve got that all now, sir. Yep. Sure-sure. I’ll get right on this.”
The silence in the room as Melba clicked the phone off, the various mouths of Petula’s staff open in shock, made me feel badly for this new detective I was growing fonder of by the second. She was new to this detective business. It was plain to see she was incredibly eager and excited about her new job, despite Starsky’s wet-blanket criticisms.
So she’d let the cat out of the bag. It wasn’t that big a deal, was it? We were all going to find out how Chef Fake died eventually, right?
How he’d died made me pause, though. If I was hearing her correctly, this plant from New Zealand hadn’t killed him? Well, that kind of threw a monkey wrench into my “poison Stevie,” didn’t it?
Melba’s humiliation, steeping in that silence, set me into action. I reached for her arm and grabbed her hand, giving it a solid shake. “So good to see you again, Detective Kaepernick! How’s detectiving? Are you settling into Eb Falls? Need any advice on where to get the best produce?”
Pulling her away from the crowd of people gathered, I continued to talk until we were in the niche by the kitchen doors.
“Aw, jeez Louise. I pretty much blew that sky-high, didn’t I?” She used her fingers to depict her words, flicking them in the air before splaying them apart.
I made light of her predicament and nudged her playfully. “Nah. Mistakes happen, Detective Kaepernick. Just ask Sandwich. He makes ’em with me all the time.”
She snorted a laugh, putting her wrist over her mouth before recovering. “Still, I’m not supposed to be handing out information so sensitive like it’s Halloween candy. It just caught me off guard, it was so weird.”
“You mean the bit about the witches?” I asked, with the hope I came off vaguely intrigued rather than truly invested.
“Yeah-yeah. That makes no sense. The crumbs around the chef’s mouth tested positive for some rare plant that—get this—witches use mixed with strands of baby’s hair and something else I can’t remember to make a poisonous spell or some such nonsense. Spooky-kooky, right? I don’t even know how forensics found it. Someone’s Google-Fu is strong, for sure. Maybe it’s that guy Kip in Seattle? He’s into all sorts of weird voodoo stuff.” She shrugged and rolled her eyes, dismissing the idea. “Anyway, it’s the only explanation anyone can find for why he’d have traces of it in his system. Sound’s batty, right? I mean, spells? Crazy-nuts.”
“So the pastry was tampered with? Told you, didn’t I?”
I winked conspiratorially even as my stomach plunged to my feet. Was this what Bel had meant by the cake?
Melba’s eyes became shiny with more excitement then. “Even if it was tampered with—which is nuts if we start chalking stuff up to witches—that’s not what killed him anyway. The plant just showed up in his tox report and Kip got a little overzealous when he went fishing for its uses on the web. The captain was just laughing about how crazy the witches and spells sounds, is all.”
So the police were going to call no poison? Huh. “Then what actually killed Pascal?”
“Asphyxiation. Someone crushed his windpipe.”
I gave a small gasp of horror I didn’t mean to escape my lips. “He was choked to death? But I don’t remember him having any marks on his neck when I saw him.” It had been dark, but that still meant I’d missed something crucial. That also meant I still wasn’t separating my emotions from my observations. I’d been so wrapped up in the mess my house was in and Bel’s disappearance, I’d clearly missed a crucial clue.
Melba confirmed I wasn’t the only person to miss the marks on his neck. “To be honest, we didn’t see it either, but it was pretty dark. Postmortem revealed a lot. Looks like he was dragged and that’s what killed him. Somebody’s arm around his neck, they think. Cutting off his oxygen is what did him in.”
I nodded my head in understanding, even though my stomach was a wreck. “And we still don’t have any explanation for why he was in my house, do we?”
Melba popped her lips. “Nope. We’re still trying to piece his movements from that day together.”
“So I guess you’re here to ask Petula about the plant? Search the kitchens, maybe? Figure out who made that pastry? Or does any of that matter when the cause of death was something else entirely?”
The ping of Melba’s phone indicated she’d received a text. I waited while she glanced at the screen, my mind racing with all sorts of possibilities.
I wasn’t convinced Pascal wasn’t poisoned. Not even a little. Sure, the police would chalk up an obscure fact like whatever Kip found to a crazy, totally unscientific theory, but I knew better. They could and likely would dismiss the idea of a poisoning because the research brought up a witch’s spell, but I couldn’t. Not when witches were involved.
And in all seriousness, were a bunch of guys from for
ensics going to whip up this concoction of a spell and test its theory to see if it really did kill someone? I’m guessing not. This wasn’t the same as testing blood spatter patterns or blunt force trauma.
But what if asphyxiation really was the cause of death? Where did that leave all our theories then?
“Everything okay?” I asked, peering over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of what was on her phone screen.
She nodded, her mouth set in a grim line as she stuffed the phone in the pocket of her jacket. “Yeah. Just a picture and some info on this crazy plant I have to ask about as a just in case. It seems kinda weird the pastry would have a rare plant in the recipe. All the research I did on this opera cake didn’t call for any plants, but that could just be residue from the chef’s fingers. It could be explained all sorts of ways.”
Sure. It could be explained all sorts of ways, except why would the chef have the residue of a rare plant from New Zealand on his hands and why would he put it in a pastry for me?
I crossed my fingers Win or Arkady had caught sight of the picture before she’d tucked her phone away so we could investigate.
Lifting my eyes, I caught Melba’s gaze again. “Still can’t believe someone would kill the chef.”
But Melba was clearly done sharing her information so freely. Stiffening up, as though she again realized she’d gone too far, the good detective gave me a curt nod. “Listen, I gotta get to work, Miss Cartwright. Thanks for makin’ me feel better about all this. I’ve already said too much, but I appreciate your efforts nonetheless. If I don’t see you before Christmas, have a merry.” She raised a distracted hand and was off to question Petula, who still stood stunned and rooted to the spot I’d left her in.
She was in good hands with Melba. I knew that instinctively. The other half of Eb Falls’ newest crime-fighting detective duo had grit, but she also had heart.
On my way out, I stopped Joanna Barnsworth, one of Petula’s staff, and smiled at her. “Would you please tell Petula to call me if she needs anything—anything at all?”
How the Witch Stole Christmas (Witchless In Seattle Book 5) Page 12